3 ms·

This simply does not scale. Small instances from enthusiasts are being funded by the person/people running it, but if we assume that one "small instance" can s

This simply does not scale. Small instances from enthusiasts are being funded by the person/people running it, but if we assume that one "small instance" can serve up to 100 people while costing pocket change to the admin, we would need 20 million "hobbyists" running their instances if the fediverse is to become an alternative to Facebook or Instagram. Larger instances based on donations are all struggling. Fosstodon started open and donation based and promised to take any surplus and donate to the upstream projects. Their last donation was in 2021 [0]. Now they even closed down for new signups and made it invite-only. Newsie.social, an instance made for journalists have 20000 sign ups, 2300 active users and less than 2% of the active user base contributes. The admin has been pleading for support in an attempt to keep it open, but it's quite likely they will announce it will close. It's ridiculous. [0]: https://hub.fosstodon.org/finances/ https://hub.fosstodon.org/finances/

jackvalentine 3y ago
> This simply does not scale. I see that as a perk. The local instance I’m on is funded mostly by donations and has been for more than a year now with success - it can’t become Twitter-scale. Old forums used to be funded by selling memberships or limited ads - but the site owner was close enough to the community that they were reasonably sensitive to their needs. I’m not particularly caring about large instances. Close registration if it’s getting too big I say! That’s not a bad thing!
- rglullis 3y ago
  From a similar discussion on Lemmy (https://communick.news/comment/420983 https://communick.news/comment/420983): I understand the sentiment, but I can’t stop feeling that it is too self-centered. I certainly agree that we do not need a billion people on the Fediverse, but at the same time I feel some moral imperative to free the billion people that are stuck on Big Tech networks, and we need to build an alternative for them.
  - jackvalentine 3y ago
    That billion people can free themselves. They don’t need us ‘enlightened saviours’ coming to tell them what they should be doing. Humans operate at community scale, not global scale. I don’t want a billion people in my community. You might think that self-centered but it allows actual community bonds to form - on my instance last month I paid the $236 that someone was in arrears for their rent because they were part of my community and in need.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Ok, then don't think of the billion people. Think of someone in your close family or friends who is addicted to Instagram and is struggling with anxiety. Think of any kid you know whose socially ineptitude can clearly be linked to them growing up glued to their phone and computer screens. You don't need to "save" them, but to think that they are all there out of their own volition and that there is no systemic change needed is quite apathetic.
      - jackvalentine 3y ago
        And what do you expect me, specifically, to do about it? My ability to help those people doesn’t scale. Healthy social media also doesn’t scale - when it does then it becomes unhealthy. It honestly sounds to me like you want my community to destroy itself in martyrdom. There is a systemic change needed - break ‘em up. Break up facebook, break up twitter, put regulations in place that prevent them ever being able to scale like that on the backs of people’s attention again. The solution isn’t some kind of new business model.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        I think those people would be equally addicted, anxious or inept on a 'healthy' platform, if such a thing could exist. Short of net-nannying every taxpaying American, there's no real way to stop people from hurting themselves with technology. It's entirely fair to say "not my problem" to something like this, what you're largely describing are self-enabled behavior loops. You want the real blackpill? The back-shelf, hidden box with an expiry of 'sometime soon' pill? There's no way to reconcile what everyone wants with a single platform, product or set of laws. Twitter flew on the borrowed wings of RSS and regular blogging, serial-killing every syndication platform it could find to sustain the business of information. It's the "solution" to our current problem, except it's got a history of being owned by despots and is struggling to turn a dime in a slight recession. What Elon Musk did was a more extremist version of what Dorsey would be forced to do someday, which is why Jack and his shareholders folded. In my opinion, what's happening right now is the inevitable curtain fall. The emperor is plainly naked, and we're still running articles about his new clothes.
ndriscoll 3y ago
Mastodon doesn't scale, but it seems to have a particularly awful implementation for performance. A more reasonable implementation of microblogging should have no trouble handling at least 1000x the load on commodity hardware.
- rglullis 3y ago
  No. What I mean by "doesn't scale" is the idea of having the fediverse dependent on millions of small instances and has nothing to do with programming language of choice. Even the Pleroma devs have said that their system is not suitable for deploys with more than 25k users.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    But you wouldn't need millions of small instances if you had better scalability per instance. Allegedly, Twitter had ~600 requests/second when it had ~350k users[0]. That's completely trivial, and as long as you use hardware from within the last 5-10 years (and, importantly, new NVMe SSDs), you should be able to handle at the very least 10x that on one server, meaning one server ought to be able to handle more like 3.5 million users at the very least. If you know what you're doing, you can do a lot more (most likely you'd end up limited by how much bandwidth you can get affordably). I don't know much about Pleroma, but it sounds like it's also very slow (i.e. it struggles with ~60 requests/second)? I've done some experiments with Phoenix and know it can do a lot more assuming it's not on a raspberry pi or something. Without knowing much about why they might have made this schema the way they did, this ticket[1] has me raising eyebrows for example. [0] http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/6/27/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10000-percent-faster.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/6/27/scaling-twitter-ma... [1] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/3139 https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/3139
    - rglullis 3y ago
      The problem of large instances is not just on the amount of users that you have, is on the amount of followers that your users have. E.g, imagine you have one user in your server that has 100k followers, spread around ~1000 instances. Each new message from this user triggers a push to these instances, and each of these instances will then make a request to you at the same time. Then, add to this that each of followers may trigger another request to your server in case the message has an embedded card or image. On a centralized system like Twitter this does not happen, on the fediverse this may lead to a self-DDOS.

jackvalentine 3y ago

> This simply does not scale. I see that as a perk. The local instance I’m on is funded mostly by donations and has been for more than a year now with success - it can’t become Twitter-scale. Old forums used to be funded by selling memberships or limited ads - but the site owner was close enough to the community that they were reasonably sensitive to their needs. I’m not particularly caring about large instances. Close registration if it’s getting too big I say! That’s not a bad thing!

rglullis 3y ago
From a similar discussion on Lemmy (https://communick.news/comment/420983 https://communick.news/comment/420983): I understand the sentiment, but I can’t stop feeling that it is too self-centered. I certainly agree that we do not need a billion people on the Fediverse, but at the same time I feel some moral imperative to free the billion people that are stuck on Big Tech networks, and we need to build an alternative for them.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  That billion people can free themselves. They don’t need us ‘enlightened saviours’ coming to tell them what they should be doing. Humans operate at community scale, not global scale. I don’t want a billion people in my community. You might think that self-centered but it allows actual community bonds to form - on my instance last month I paid the $236 that someone was in arrears for their rent because they were part of my community and in need.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Ok, then don't think of the billion people. Think of someone in your close family or friends who is addicted to Instagram and is struggling with anxiety. Think of any kid you know whose socially ineptitude can clearly be linked to them growing up glued to their phone and computer screens. You don't need to "save" them, but to think that they are all there out of their own volition and that there is no systemic change needed is quite apathetic.
    - jackvalentine 3y ago
      And what do you expect me, specifically, to do about it? My ability to help those people doesn’t scale. Healthy social media also doesn’t scale - when it does then it becomes unhealthy. It honestly sounds to me like you want my community to destroy itself in martyrdom. There is a systemic change needed - break ‘em up. Break up facebook, break up twitter, put regulations in place that prevent them ever being able to scale like that on the backs of people’s attention again. The solution isn’t some kind of new business model.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      I think those people would be equally addicted, anxious or inept on a 'healthy' platform, if such a thing could exist. Short of net-nannying every taxpaying American, there's no real way to stop people from hurting themselves with technology. It's entirely fair to say "not my problem" to something like this, what you're largely describing are self-enabled behavior loops. You want the real blackpill? The back-shelf, hidden box with an expiry of 'sometime soon' pill? There's no way to reconcile what everyone wants with a single platform, product or set of laws. Twitter flew on the borrowed wings of RSS and regular blogging, serial-killing every syndication platform it could find to sustain the business of information. It's the "solution" to our current problem, except it's got a history of being owned by despots and is struggling to turn a dime in a slight recession. What Elon Musk did was a more extremist version of what Dorsey would be forced to do someday, which is why Jack and his shareholders folded. In my opinion, what's happening right now is the inevitable curtain fall. The emperor is plainly naked, and we're still running articles about his new clothes.

ndriscoll 3y ago

Mastodon doesn't scale, but it seems to have a particularly awful implementation for performance. A more reasonable implementation of microblogging should have no trouble handling at least 1000x the load on commodity hardware.

rglullis 3y ago
No. What I mean by "doesn't scale" is the idea of having the fediverse dependent on millions of small instances and has nothing to do with programming language of choice. Even the Pleroma devs have said that their system is not suitable for deploys with more than 25k users.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  But you wouldn't need millions of small instances if you had better scalability per instance. Allegedly, Twitter had ~600 requests/second when it had ~350k users[0]. That's completely trivial, and as long as you use hardware from within the last 5-10 years (and, importantly, new NVMe SSDs), you should be able to handle at the very least 10x that on one server, meaning one server ought to be able to handle more like 3.5 million users at the very least. If you know what you're doing, you can do a lot more (most likely you'd end up limited by how much bandwidth you can get affordably). I don't know much about Pleroma, but it sounds like it's also very slow (i.e. it struggles with ~60 requests/second)? I've done some experiments with Phoenix and know it can do a lot more assuming it's not on a raspberry pi or something. Without knowing much about why they might have made this schema the way they did, this ticket[1] has me raising eyebrows for example. [0] http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/6/27/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10000-percent-faster.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/6/27/scaling-twitter-ma... [1] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/3139 https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/3139
  - rglullis 3y ago
    The problem of large instances is not just on the amount of users that you have, is on the amount of followers that your users have. E.g, imagine you have one user in your server that has 100k followers, spread around ~1000 instances. Each new message from this user triggers a push to these instances, and each of these instances will then make a request to you at the same time. Then, add to this that each of followers may trigger another request to your server in case the message has an embedded card or image. On a centralized system like Twitter this does not happen, on the fediverse this may lead to a self-DDOS.